The film's origins are curious, as indicated in its epigraph: “Although some incidents are imaginary...this is a true story. It happened to Coral Browne in 1958” (ellipsis in original). In that year, the Anglo-Australian actress Coral Brown was performing in a British touring production of Shakespeare's Hamlet that was visiting Moscow. There, by chance, she encountered Burgess, visited his apartment for lunch, and, on returning to London, undertook his requests to have clothes ordered from his tailor and shoemaker. In the television piece, Browne, 25 years on, played herself and reenacts a version of these events. From Browne’s personal history, Bennett and Schlesinger constructed a deft television drama, permeated by two overriding and overlapping themes: the issue of identity (national, ideological, and cultural) and the nature of loyalty.

It begins in the middle of a performance of Hamlet with Browne on stage and an evidently unwell Burgess (played by Alan Bates) in the audience, attempting to leave his seat. In (crumpled) evening dress and bow tie, attempting to excuse himself in a poor mixture of Russian and English, he already seems out of step with the Muscovites around him. While trying to locate his old Cambridge University friend (playing Claudius) during the interval, Burgess is forced to dive into the nearest doorway– that of Browne’s dressing room–to be sick. So begins the unlikely encounter, and the first scenes conclude with Burgess stealing Browne’s  soap, English cigarettes, and vodka: some small but telling luxuries in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

Accepting Burgess’s invitation to lunch the next day, Browne struggles to locate the address, and a visit to the British Embassy is of little assistance. In the part of the film where, one suspects, Bennett’s characterization had the freest reign, Browne struggles to get help from a double act of arrogant, youthful diplomats whose mannerisms and puerility seem to perpetuate a vision of diplomatic Life as a continuation of Oxbridge college life. Their behavior and repartee, as they seek to persuade Browne not to visit Burgess, smacks of the University review or the music hall; but they also serve to put into context, albeit in a caricature fashion, a set of class and gender prejudices (for they also belittle their female secretary) that help the viewer make sense of Burgess’s struggle with his background.

Once at Burgess’s drab, messy apartment in a rundown block, Browne spends longer than anticipated in his eccentric company, for he is not allowed to leave home until he gets a call from, as he puts it, “my people.” She declines “lunch” ( a couple of tomatoes), measures him up for his clothes, and listens to music, and they discuss England, communism, gossip, and gay sex, all with Burgess’s verbal sprightliness. While they are funny and light, these Central scenes are also where the film's purple passages occur..

Bate’s Burgess, in his disheveled eccentricity and shabby charm, seems to shy away from much that might be called earnestness. Yet in his finally judged performance and in Bennett's sharp script, the questions of loyalty and identity emerge but are never labored. This “Englishman abroad” encapsulates the paradoxes of someone who has politically and ideologically rejected his National and class background while being a social and cultural product of it. Spurred on by Burgess’s sense of irony, Browne makes the mistake of wondering what there is to admire in the Soviet Union. Burgess responds calmly but forcefully: “the system–though being English, you wouldn't be interested in that. He frequently comments on the society and the social class he has left, where seemingly minor details, such as going to the right tailor or having the right School tie, establish who one is rather than one's beliefs. He rails against those who want to change England, but, as a spy (someone whose raison d'etre is to subvert the nation and the system), his view of his native country is deeply conflicted:

So little, England; little music, little art, timid, tasteful, nice. Yet one loves it. You see, I can’t say I love London, I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country. I don’t know what that means.

It would be easy to overstress the sentimental and nostalgic layer of An Englishman Abroad. On one level, Bates’s Burgess may seem to evade reaching conclusions about the fundamental sadness (as Browne sees it) of his condition, rather like the character of Bennett's Talking Heads monologues. There is considerable evidence for such a view: he punctuates his banter with the phrase “the Comrades, those Splendid in every other respect…) to introduce yet another deficiency of Soviet life; he is shadowed constantly by secret police, and his movements are restricted; his life is immeasurably poorer materially; he struggles with a half-understood language, a harsh winter, no meaningful social context, and no family (the camera passes over a photo of his mother in England); and he even wonders whether his Russian lover/partner is part of the surveillance operation.

Yet when Browne upbraids Burgess for presenting his treason as merely a kind of Wildean social transgression, she implicitly highlights the lifelong role manipulation that has characterized Burgess’s life, and viewers must be cautious about the conclusions they draw. Burgess later insists, “I do like it here–don’t tell anyone I don't”; and at one level of this complex personality, that must be taken at face value. At this level, the chaos of his life masks someone who, as history documents and he himself avers, took politics and ideas so seriously as to define the course of his life by them because “at the time I thought it was the right thing to do.”

Given the film's gay writer and gay director and the Indiscreet homosexuality of Burgess before his defection, one might expect the theme of homosexual identity (the sexual outsider) to be aligned with that of the political outsider. However, this is not the case: homosexuality is here a secondary, even a neutral, factor in the English upper-middle-class context. In contrast to Burgess, the gay subversive, the British establishment, in the guise of the two diplomats, is effeminate and misogynistic.

Visually, Schlesinger harks back to the British television tradition of the documentary and to his own early working-class realist films. Although the film is shot in color, the handheld camera work, in conjunction with the extraordinarily effective mock-Moscow senses (provided by the bleak landscapes of Dundee), provide the very opposite of a glossy period reconstruction.

The film’s settings and themes are also conveyed by telling musical choices. A soundtrack of atmospheric, occasionally discordant tones with Russian elements establishes geographical context and ambience. This is interspersed by specific and telling music references to give resonance to the “Englishman abroad” theme. Burgess intones a classic English hymn (“Oh God Our Help in Ages Past”) in the theater lavatory: a striking mismatch of musical and physical context. Browne is treated to Burgess’s one and only record, played on a wind-up gramophone: Jack Buchanan’s “Who Stole My Heart Away,” a wistful popular evocation of pre-war lost love, made more relevant by Coral Browne’s real life involvement with Buchanan (“we were almost married,” she comments). Burgess and his Russian partner even do a bizarre intercultural Gilbert and Sulllivan rendition on balalaika and piano. And in the film’s most openly emotional scene, Burgess is moved to tears by the choir at an Orthodox church.

Music also dominates the final images of An Englishman Abroad. A newly resplendent Burgess, fitted out in his pristine London-made suit, hat, and shows, strides out into the Moscow snow, a dapper object of consternation to the Muscovites. This is overlaid with more Gilbert and Sullivan, from HMS Pinafore, as a rousing chorus singsL

But in spite of all temptations

To Belong to other nations, 

He remains an Englishman!

He remains an Englishman!